faithrunner

Work as Worship This past Sunday at Legacy Church , I told the story of a running partner who told me how she had sent an email to her office inviting the women in it to a small group she led at her church. Her plan backfired when one of her peers scolded her for using company resources for religious use. She admitted that was a mistake, but invited her to the group anyway. She went on to tell me how the girl had come to the group, grown in her curiosity about God, and that she attended regularly now. As we continued to run she told me more stories about how she leveraged her consulting and traveling as a platform for sharing her faith . (She no longer used company email for invitations to her faith activities.) I complemented her for seeing all of her life as a mission field and her network of relationships as her responsibility in serving others in the name of Jesus. She smiled and said, "I guess I'm a missionary with a corporate sponsor." I agreed, and that...

Over the Christmas and New Year break, I read Gabe Lyon's next book, The Next Christians (DoubleDay, 2010) . I heard Gabe at the Catalyst Conference back in October and was impressed with his impassioned presentation of his observations about "the good news about the end of Christian America." (I was mostly impressed with his own family's response to their son, Cade's, Down Syndrome as an example of what he was describing.) I'm a bit of an existentialist when it comes to verifying the premise of others, so, what I had observed in larger venues like Catalyst and Right Now , I also saw in the younger generation of Christ followers at Legacy. Lyons seems to be on target: these "next Christians" want little to do with maintaining the institution of the church and following its programs, but they deeply desire to engage the bigger needs of humanity in the name of Jesus. Lyons begins his assessment of Christians response to change in similar fashion ...